To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.

To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.

Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.

Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.